1. Technical Field
The invention disclosed broadly relates to data processing and more particularly relates to linguistic applications in data processing.
2. Background Art
Text processing and word processing systems have been developed for both stand-alone applications and distributed processing applications. The terms text processing and word processing will be used interchangeably herein to refer to data processing systems primarily used for the creation, editing, communication, and/or printing of alphanumeric character strings composing written text. A particular distributed processing system for word processing is disclosed in the copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 781,862 filed Sept. 30, 1985 now Pat. No. 4,731,735 entitled "multilingual Processing for Screen Image Build and Command Decode in a Word Processor, with Full Command, Message and Help Support," by K. W. Borgendale, et al. The figures and specification of the Borgendale, et al. patent application are incorporated herein by reference, as an example of a host system within which the subject invention herein can be applied.
Parsing is the analysis of text for the identification of sentence components including part of speech and phrase structure. Parsing may also involve the association of the sentence components into a representation of the meaning of the sentence.
Many of the problems encountered in parsing natural languages are due to semantic ambiguities. The ambiguities may result in difficulties in defining the sentence components, in assigning the part of speech, or in the association of the sentence components.
The difficulty in assigning part of speech is illustrated by the sentence "I saw her duck" where there is a question as to whether the pronoun "her" is a possessive pronoun and "duck" is a noun or whether "her" is an objective pronoun and "duck" is a verb.
The sentences "John has a book" and "John has a head" have identical structure and can be assigned parts of speech easily, but they require different meaning representations because the concept "book" is something that John possesses whereas "head" is a part of John.
In the sentence "Sam saw John with the telescope" it is not possible to ascertain whether Sam or John had the telescope and to bind the prepositional phrase with the appropriate noun.
Representing semantic distinctions in a computer framework is necessary for some types of applications, but there are many useful applications which are not affected by ambiguities in sentence structure or by the way in which meanings are represented.